Background: Right Hemisphere offers software solutions that repurpose existing 3D CAD data for visual communication. By automating the extraction of content and making it available as general-purpose, lightweight files that can be published in downstream solutions, Right Hemisphere helps companies get the most out of their investments in engineering design data.

Challenge: Right Hemisphere must provide solutions that satisfy a broad range of developers and end users. Visual quality of the leveraged content must be uncompromised, and users require real-time interactivity when manipulating the content and publishing it into Web pages, training courseware, technical documents, sales and marketing, parts catalogs, or any other online or printed collateral.

Solution: Right Hemisphere engineering teams take advantage of NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions to develop their software visual communication solutions. Specifically, they rely on the high performance of the NVIDIA solutions to speed their work, high image quality to achieve the best visual results, and powerful shader functionality to integrate maximum functionality and photorealistic effects into their software.

Benefits: The end users of Right Hemisphere software also choose NVIDIA Quadro solutions to optimize the visual impact of leveraged content, and to get the best real-time performance when manipulating large, complex, 3D visualizations.

The innovators at Right Hemisphere asked themselves that question about 3D content. If a company has already invested in expensive CAD software and has created detailed models of their products, why not figure out how to reuse that data in marketing literature, customer training modules, online sales demonstrations, technical documentation, and other communications that would be enhanced by interactive visualizations? They did figure it out, and today Right Hemisphere provides the infrastructure and tools needed to get the most out of existing 3D CAD data.

The automated software solutions from Right Hemisphere, developed using the latest NVIDIA professional graphics solutions, enable businesses to translate and process CAD files into general-purpose, re-usable, lightweight visuals in a matter of minutes. Instead of flat, 2D photos or expensive and time-consuming custom-generated artwork, companies can extract a lightweight, photorealistic 3D model directly from a CAD file and publish it in a Web page or an interactive training module. Viewers can walk around the product, sit in the driver’s seat, or open up the product and look at the internal components. Animation and interactivity can be added to show how the moving parts operate.

Right Hemisphere customers, with NVIDIA-powered PC workstations, have the performance they need for viewing 3D interactive data, and gain the ability to:

Capitalize on CAD data outside of engineering by reusing this data for downstream process improvements

Lower the cost of content development for training, documentation, marketing, parts management, and support materials

Accelerate time to market through the concurrent creation of products and their supportability materials

End the disruption of engineering workers by reducing their visualization workload for other departments

Establish product communication consistency through "create once publish anywhere" technology—interactive 2D and 3D content can be published in HTML, MS Office applications, PDF, or EXE for CD distribution

A just-in-time training (JITT) application provides a tutorial on cleaning and replacing filter elements. Courseware developers use Right Hemisphere solutions and NVIDIA graphics to leverage existing 3D CAD data and add interactivity, animation, and other effects for high-impact training content. To see the Web-based demo of this type of repurposed data, go to www.righthemisphere.com. Image: Courtesy of Right Hemisphere

The heart of the Right Hemisphere product line, Deep Server™, is a powerful content automation engine that translates existing CAD models into lightweight, re-usable graphics files that can be published in downstream visual communication solutions. Developing Deep Server required a graphics platform that could optimize both visual quality and real-time performance. As Mark Thomas, chief technology officer at Right Hemisphere, explains, “We fundamentally load and manipulate large 3D models. To design and develop our software, our engineers need the best graphics hardware and driver functionality available. We chose NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions for the quality, speed, and real-time rendering power. We take advantage of everything that the Quadro solutions were designed to do so that we can provide the most optimized graphics solutions for our customers.”

Right Hemisphere engineers develop on a variety of hardware and software platforms, all equipped with NVIDIA graphics technology. The Right Hemisphere software solutions have been optimized to take full advantage of NVIDIA features and capabilities, including the following key NVIDIA strengths:

The NVIDIA Cg shader language streamlines the extraction of photorealistic effects from repurposed CAD models. The high-level language constructs, and NVIDIA tools enable the Right Hemisphere team to incorporate user-friendly features into their solutions and transform CAD investments into visual and interactive resources.

The antialiasing performance of the NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics solutions enable the implementation of powerful visual extraction and editing tools that can deliver optimal image quality to end users.

Support for large amounts of graphics memory maximizes performance when translating very large CAD models, or when extracting visuals that involve very complex scenes. With up to 256MB of memory, the NVIDIA Quadro FX solutions can also deliver interactive performance when displaying complex textures.

Leading performance Up to 133 million triangles per second, and 4.5 billion texels per second means that the NVIDIA Quadro professional solutions empower any desktop to display the most compelling visuals. NVIDIA Quadro graphics power enables real-time manipulation of 3D models and ensures the highest visual quality.

Empowering the Content Developers and the Viewers

The Right Hemisphere visual communication solutions are employed in a variety of industries. Originally, the first of the company’s products included professional authoring tools and utilities that were popular in the film and game graphics markets. The experience in optimized high-quality graphics gained in these markets is now invaluable to the current Right Hemisphere offerings that focus on addressing the visual product-related presentation and communication needs of the manufacturing enterprise. Within the manufacturing sector, Right Hemisphere is primarily focused on the military and aerospace sectors as well as automotive and transportation.

Original CAD Data

Photorealistic rendering styles

Non-photorealistic illustration styles for enhanced visual clarity

Images: Courtesy of Right Hemisphere

Customers can deploy Right Hemisphere solutions on any PC workstation equipped with any graphics processing unit (GPU) of their choosing. For demonstrations, Right Hemisphere sales teams routinely use NVIDIA graphics to show the power, speed, and quality of their CAD repurposing and publishing software. Anton Commissaris, vice president of business development at Right Hemisphere, says, "NVIDIA is the strongest brand in the high-end CAD workstation market. We recommend NVIDIA as the platform of choice for our customers when repurposing their CAD data for reuse in downstream product-related interactive training, technical documentation, marketing, parts management, and support solutions. We demonstrate our visual communication solutions using NVIDIA Quadro graphics because we know our software will appear at its best with the image quality and performance that Quadro provides."

Marketing and sales teams can take advantage of existing CAD data, using Right Hemisphere tools and NVIDIA graphics to interactively edit the images based on the communication requirements.
Image: Courtesy of Right Hemisphere

For 3D data repurposing, the graphics platform decision takes into account several factors throughout the product lifecycle. Right Hemisphere customers typically perform extensive benchmarking on their own, before making their graphics decisions. Says Commissaris, “Most of our customers initially choose NVIDIA Quadro graphics for its superior image quality and performance. CAD customers are really starting to care about visual quality and this means advanced shaders and materials for photorealistic effects—just the kind of technology that NVIDIA excels in.” CAD customers are also choosing NVIDIA Quadro solutions for the development of the downstream training courseware content and interactive electronic technical manuals. Ultimately, NVIDIA is also winning as a training delivery platform because NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics give students the best run-time visual quality and performance for the price.

Right Hemisphere also uses the power of NVIDIA graphics to deliver solutions to customers that want to leverage 3D CAD data for technical documentation, Web-posted information, multimedia presentations for customers and partners, and a variety of other marketing and product support functions.

The combination of Right Hemisphere software and NVIDIA graphics technology is revolutionizing training for complex systems. Courseware developers have gained the ability to quickly and inexpensively generate more compelling, informative content for training, and, more importantly, to keep the training content synchronized with the engineering data from the current design.

"For aircraft flight and maintenance training, customers are replacing multi-million dollar applications and large simulators with desktop and laptop training solutions that only cost $5K to $10K per seat," explains Commissaris. "Not only do they gain huge up-front savings, but the ongoing training costs are also significantly decreased since training can be delivered without requiring travel to the simulator site. Moreover, by conveying extremely technical information in a rich, interactive 3D format, fast understanding is promoted, with improved retention of instructions so that costly mistakes can be avoided."

Lockheed Martin will deploy a leading-edge just-in-time training solution for pilots of its F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) stealthy, supersonic plane. The courseware developer—Northrop Grumman Corporation—uses Right Hemisphere Deep Server software and NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics to generate rich, interactive 3D training materials that leverage existing engineering information used in the construction of the aircraft. From a PC, users will be able to interact directly with different parts of the aircraft to quickly understand and apply knowledge about the plane.

Image: Courtesy of Right Hemisphere

For the F-16 fighter jet, Lockheed Martin also chose to power Right Hemisphere software with NVIDIA graphics for an immersive, laptop training system. "The software brings stunning reality to training by taking advantage of NVIDIA’s graphics engine," says Chuck Hoag, F-16 pilot training team lead, at Lockheed Martin Corporation.

These new training solutions use the power of NVIDIA graphics to include real-time interactive animations of moving parts, such as the rudder pedals, to illustrate their precise movement. With the combination of Right Hemisphere software and NVIDIA graphics, the animation process for a particular assembly was developed in mere minutes—a process that would have required about a week of time if created manually. The emerging courseware is so effective, that manufacturing industries are re-thinking what needs to be learned, when it needs to be learned, and how it can be best learned. Traditional training systems are giving way to just in time training (JITT), where information is made available, as needed, to service teams in the field. Since 3D content speeds time to insight, students can be taught just the basics up front, and can access the detailed procedures and specifications on the spot when the need to know arises.

Taking 3D Engineering Data Beyond Engineering

The combination of Right Hemisphere and NVIDIA technology bring rich 3D content to the enterprise, allowing viewers to rotate and manipulate the image, click on subcomponents, and exercise links to related parts information and tables.
Image: Courtesy of Right Hemisphere

Right Hemisphere and NVIDIA share a common vision—that of taking 3D CAD data beyond the engineering department and making it useful in multiple ways across the enterprise and value chain. By adding photorealistic effects and real-time interactivity for compelling visual communications, all facets of a manufacturing business can be enhanced, especially when dealing with complex products and systems or projects that involve multiple vendors and partners. Consolidating engineering data and making it available for reuse in a variety of formats ensures a maximum return on investments from that data and offers a variety of business benefits including shortened time to market and more up-to-date, informative product communications.

The combination of high-performance NVIDIA graphics, affordable desktop and laptop platforms, and powerful Right Hemisphere graphical data server software and visualization extraction and editing tools is making this vision a reality today. Thomas summarizes, "The timing is perfect for the proliferation of 3D data. There is already plenty of 3D content in the world, and now we offer the tools needed to extract that data from the engineering software and make it available to every desktop. With NVIDIA graphics, any user can retrieve, edit, and view complex visualizations with the image quality that used to require high-end supercomputers and proprietary graphics hardware."